


Savior of the Waking World

by adjourned



Series: Rose and Dirk metamorphose into giant space snakes when they meet maybe [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Abusive Dave's Bro | Beta Dirk Strider, Alternate Universe - Demons, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Gen, Metafiction, Multiverse, Post-Canon, Sadstuck, The Homestuck Epilogues, Ultimate Dirk Strider - Freeform, Ultimate Rose Lalonde, ultimate self
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-27
Updated: 2019-09-27
Packaged: 2020-10-29 03:50:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20790158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adjourned/pseuds/adjourned
Summary: Dave finds an uninvited visitor in the apartment.They have an interesting conversation.





	Savior of the Waking World

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Grand Battement of the Learned](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19227817) by [Opacifica](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opacifica/pseuds/Opacifica). 

> I want to punch the person who first entered "ultimate self" as a tag, making "Ultimate Self" now automatically uncapitalize and ruining the tag formatting.
> 
> At least I think that's how it works.

Dave knew something was up the second he stepped through the door.

The wards—the same ones his bro had made him meticulously disassemble and reconstruct from memory forty times last spring to earn his allowance, the same wards the paranoid guardian spent half of each morning checking and double-checking before taking a step out the apartment—were damaged. He could feel the frayed threads of the matrix tickling the back of his senses as his body crossed the threshold, a minuscule yet distinct discontinuity that he'd have missed had he not spent his whole life marinating in them.

The thirteen-year-old boy glanced around the living room, ducking under the marionette hanging from the ceiling as he silently padded to the front of the foyer, sword at the ready.

The wards had been surgically snipped and stitched back together without tripping the alarm, so this had to be the handiwork of either a higher demon, a malicious practitioner, or his bro himself pulling another inscrutable test on his unsuspecting ass. None of those options boded well for him: Dave's bladework was fast enough to cut down any spellgibbering snooper skulking around their apartment, but as his bro had rubbed in time and again through their daily spars, an elder fallen (or god forbid, a manifest denizen) would have his entrails decorating the walls before the boy even got the chance to blink.

Nevertheless, there was no choice but to advance. If this _was_ a test, chickening out would be the single worst move Dave could possibly make.

Something creaked from far down the hallway, and Dave froze.

Bro never made a sound unless he wanted to, even in the privacy of his own apartment.

Someone else was here.

For a brief moment Dave considered calling his brother, but almost immediately discarded the thought. An elder demon would have sniffed him out by now, so it was a human in there, and if he couldn't handle one measly home invader, what good was he? He was already on thin ice that week after getting his ass kicked halfway to the seventh gate by a fucking amber basilisk of all things, so he really wasn't looking forward to drawing any more of his guardian's ire.

Carefully stepping over the tabloid magazines littering the floor, Dave snuck his way to the side of the corridor and cautiously peered around the wall. The door to his bro's room was hanging ajar, the light of sunset trickling through the crack. Glaring red flag right in his face again. That thing was layered with so many curses and blood seals it would be easier to simply blow through the wall with brute force than break the lock.

"Come out," a female voice called from inside the room.

Dave's grip tightened on his weapon.

He began to reconsider his stance on calling his bro. Or at least his stance on not nabbing a sword that wasn't a cheap piece of shit from the kitchen, because the bargain bin reject he was holding was fit for stabbing imps and not much else.

"Who the fuck are you?" he shouted back.

The voice took a few seconds to respond.

"Dave, I know it's you."

His blood turned to ice in his veins.

"Not my name, but nice try," Dave attempted to deflect, sneaking closer to the crack of light.

Footsteps echoed from inside the room.

"Dave Strider? No?" She sounded amused.

How did she know his birth name? He was supposed to be the Knight, mostly "the Prince's runty sidekick" to people in the industry, sometimes TG to his few and far between friends. Never Dave, and definitely not ever Dave Strider. The number of people who knew those three syllables could be counted on one hand, and none of them were this woman.

"It's okay, Dave," she continued, the sound of her steps migrating towards the door. Dave raised his sword and settled into a defensive stance. "You're free now."

"Free from what?" he asked, but the unsettling itch crawling up his back told him more than he needed already.

His bro hadn't said he was going on a hunt today. Granted, the silent dude never told him anything most of the time, but now that he thought about it, Dave remembered seeing the Prince's work shoes by the door when he came in.

And Dave's bro made a rule of being back by sundown unless he was out on a job.

"You're aware that what he did to you was sick, right?" she said, the voice passing out of the door crack. His neck prickled—she was right there, just out of sight. "What he did, period. Your Dirk was one of the worst, and I've shared a universe with some profoundly evil specimens over my travels."

Dave couldn't tell if it was his imagination, <del>if it was wishful thinking,</del> but there was a faint stench of blood drifting from his bro's room, overlaid by a thin whiff of sulfur.

"Evil? We kill demons," the boy said, swallowing. "We _defend_ humainty. What the fuck are you talking about?"

"Do you?" the woman asked as the crack yawned wider. Dave could see her shadow spill across the corridor, framed by warm orange. He could make out the gently billowing silhouette of a dress and an outline of a pointed implement.

"I have to admit that this world of yours is quaint in its deceptive simplicity. Hunters and demons deadlocked in eternal war, light against dark, good against evil." Dave wasn't a fan of the mockery in her tone. "Yet behind that superficial delineation, what do we find? A cosmic arms race of attrition and moral compromise. Free will bargained and sold for power and relevance. I can see why it would bring out the worst in Dirk."

"If I wanted a lecture on theurgic ethics from a condescending asshole I'd have hit up Scratch," Dave called out.

"It's hard to resist the compulsion when I get in a mood. I'll blame it on the Aspect."

"What did you do?" he said.

"I killed Dirk," She tossed out like next week's weather forecast. Dave stilled, heart beating faster in his chest. "The instance of him native to this universe, at least."

"Why?" Dave asked.

He wasn't sure why he was still standing here outside his bro's room talking like a dumbass instead of dishing out some prime cut revenge murder, but... actually, scratch that. He knew precisely why: he was stalling. Not for anything in particular, no.

He just didn't want to die.

She was telling the truth. Dave could sense the decades of layered power his bro had bound to this place unraveling around them as they spoke, untethered from the life force of their master. Bro was dead, and he was meters away from the killer. He'd never won a strife against his guardian, and if she'd manage to take him down... with such a power differential in play, he had no chance of coming out on top in this fight, and he knew it.

"He was a bad person," the voice responded. "His mere existence was a corrupting influence on this world and infinite beyond. Isn't that enough?"

Dave had absolutely no clue what this crazy chick was babbling about.

"What the hell do you mean?" he growled. "I told you. That's the exact opposite of what he does. We hunt the bastards that fuck things up."

"Do you truly think that?" she mused. "Or are you repeating a lie you tell yourself to make you feel better?"

"Fuck yourself with an cactus," he growled. Shit. He was getting defensive now. She was trying to get in his head, Dave told himself. She broke into his apartment, killed bro, and nothing could change the cold reality that she was a murderer and a threat to his life. "He was a hero. He took down monsters. We did good."

The woman's voice ran cold. "That's what you call what he did to Karkat and Terezi?"

The words hit him like a thirty-ton anvil.

"You don't know anything," he choked.

His knuckles were turning white at the force he was gripping his sword.

_Weak_, he could hear his brother whispering.

"Just go, Dave" she said softly.

What was she so _sad_ about? He didn't need her crocodile tears. He'd left those names in the past where they belonged. They had been mistakes, and mistakes were corrected, and that was all there was to say on the matter. The claws sinking into his chest, tearing forgotten scars open and stoking embers of buried regret into a renewed, torturous burning, those were more of the sick mind games he refused to acknowledge. He was better than that.

"Go. Forget about me. Forget Dirk Strider. I'll be gone from this continuum once you turn around, and you'll never hear from either of us again. You can live life however you want. You don't have to be trapped in this Sisyphean hell anymore."

"I can't," Dave heard himself say. "I have to kill you."

"Your loyalty to your brother is admirable, but woefully misplaced. He never cared about you, and I think you know that. Not as anything beyond another disposable piece in his macabre puppet theatre, at least. You don't owe him anything."

"Who are you?" Dave growled. "Stop hiding and come out!"

A long silence elapsed.

"As you wish," the woman called back.

He tensed and readied his weapon.

The door to his bro's room swung open, and a hooded figure in black and lavender stepped out.

Dave wasted no time in hesitation, surging forward and slashing down at the stranger's wrist in the blink of an eye.

The wand of pure abyssal darkness flicked before Dave had crossed even half the distance, unleashing a pulse of black magic that blasted the boy back and tumbling to the floor. He bounced to his feet without missing a beat, rebounding off the wall, skipping off the ceiling and launching himself back down towards the witch. That was the trick to dealing with the typical dark mage: engage, don't give them a second to cast. Chanting and waving took time, decapitation took one swing.

This was not a typical dark mage.

She didn't even move a finger. Cracks of corruption spiderwebbed up his sword in a fraction of a second, and before he could let go, the entire blade shattered with explosive force, punching Dave to the ground again and spraying shards of smoldering metal everywhere. The corrupted steel ricocheted off an invisible wall in front of the woman, and to the boy's surprise, against a flickering dome above his own fallen form as well.

Well, so much for pretending he wasn't well and thoroughly outclassed.

With a defeated grunt, Dave dropped what was left of his shitty sword and propped himself up on his elbows. He might as well surrender and get a head start on kissing her polished black boots, not that there was likely much mercy left in her after he'd taken her charity and thrown it in her face. Maybe he might get a quick execution instead of being fed piecemeal to her pet demon for breakfast cereal.

The shadow of her hood obscured her facial features, but from the woman's height and build, she was at least a decade his senior. He didn't recognize her for any of his bro's old enemies, and her apparel wasn't immediately evocative of any known dark cults or covens, so even now that he had a second to inspect his foe, he wasn't quite sure what he was looking at.

"Dave," she sighed, exasperated, but without a trace of anger.

She flicked her hood back, wavy locks falling as she shook her head, and Dave saw.

Her face was aged up, sunken and traced with fatigue, but the eyes didn't lie. It had been two years since he'd last saw her, yet memory was still fresh as day. No, there was no mistaking it.

"Rose?" Dave breathed, confusion and disheartenment warring across his face. "Why are you... how..."

"I'm not the Rose you know," she said, looking down. She was missing her hairband, hair grown out past her shoulders. "This universe's instance of me is still apprenticing under Cetus' priesthood. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that I'm not _only_ her. I contain to varying extents a vast multitude of Roses across the greater multiverse, one of which is the Rose Lalonde you know."

"You're older," was all Dave managed to say. He was so thoroughly stumped by this turn of events that confusion momentarily blanked out his sensible apprehension against following in his bro's footsteps and being murdered by his alt-universe genetic half-sister. "I don't understand."

"I'm twenty four," Rose said, kneeling down to the sprawled Dave on the floor. She took his hand gently in hers, squeezing it in what she probably intended to be a reassuring gesture, but which only rattled his frayed nerves even more. Not that he showed it. "Physically, at least. The incarnation of Rose that breached through to her Ultimate Self and eventually consolidated into me would be twenty four by now."

"Can we hit the brakes on the thaumobabble bullet train before it shoots past the borders of my feeble comprehension and starts spinning its wheels off into Lalonde Monologue La La Land?" Dave snapped without thinking. Then what he said to the grim murdery woman hit him, and he kicked into a classic Strider frantic backpedal. "Fuck, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to-"

"I'm not going to hurt you, Dave," his maybe-sister said, lips curving down. "I apologize. This has to be overwhelming for you."

Dave swallowed. Part of him was irked at being treated like a child, but the rest was very insistently reminding him that the person in front of him was, by her own admission, _not_ the Rose he knew, and incredibly dangerous to boot. Don't antagonize the probably evil witch, he reminded himself.

"You killed my bro," he pointed out, doing his best to project utmost respect. "Rose" was all calm and agreeable right now, but messing with dark forces infamously did weird things to emotional stability. He didn't want to risk her snapping on a dime and blowing his head off. "And you're, uh, very obviously a grimdark warlock. So forgive me if I'm a wee bit skeptical of that statement, or at least of its probable veracity past the most immediate future."

She withdrew, sensing Dave's discomfort, but a ghost of a smile twitched over her face nonetheless.

"I will never fail to be amused that 'grimdark' is a precise technical term in this world," she said, producing a small chuckle. "But in spite of its agreeable realness attribute, 'grimdark' is a less-than-accurate descriptor of my powers. No, the dark gods I consort with hail from a ring of existence far beyond the deepest abysses of hell you could possibly know of."

"That makes me feel very reassured," Dave muttered. "See this? This is my reassured face."

Against his better instincts, the boy was slowly edging towards a state of relative ease with this insane supervillainess lady. She was just... so... _Rose_. An older, edgier version, but still brimming with the same smug self-satisfaction, keeping her typical subdued mannerisms and rationing out genuine expressions like it was the twelfth consecutive month of an acute sincerity drought.

"Why don't we get off the floor first?" she suggested, reaching a hand out to Dave.

* * *

Dave eyed the device Rose deployed on the cleared kitchen countertop distrustfully. It looked kind of like a mix between a microscope and 3D printer, with a bunch of tiny card slots on the side, all of which was a fancy way of saying he'd never seen anything like it in his life. Rose typed something into the holographic keyboard, and somehow that made a glass bottle of yellow liquid materialize on the gizmo's little center pad. Magic. Hooray.

She tossed the bottle at him. He caught it out of the air after a split second of hesitation, unscrewed the cap and took a cautious sniff. Well, if she wanted to kill him she had her chance, so he wasn't going to question the mystery apple juice.

After manifesting a steaming mug of coffee out of probably luminiferous aether with the same gizmo, Rose walked over and joined him on the couch.

"Did you love him?" Rose said.

Dave almost dropped his juice.

"Wow, maybe give me some warning next time before you hit with the heavy questions?"

"So?"

He shut his mouth.

She sighed. "It's complicated, isn't it?"

After a short pause, Dave nodded mutely.

"Tale as old as time. Let me change the question: would you describe him as a good person? Or perhaps, sidestepping the reductionist moral dichotomies, would you trust him with every life in the multiverse?"

Dave's heart clenched.

_Snickts of an unbreakable blade through gray flesh. Red and teal running down the wall, pooling in shades of muddy brown. His own scream, reflected back at him threefold, ringing in his ears._

No.

Everything about his bro was impossible to unpack. The man was an enigma even dead, and oh yes, dead he very much was. Dave had seen the corpse himself, impaled on the man's own katana, triangular shades cracked and dripping with blood. His first instinct had been horror, yet laced with a thread of relief, then smothered by a wave of guilt and anger for thinking that. Mostly he was confused.

For all that Dirk Strider should never have been allowed near a child—and that was the one thing Dave was willing to admit to himself—he had done good. He sealed the Lion's Mouth, slew the Hegemonic Beast alone, stormed the Noble Crypts with only a sword and torch. He was the only man to have taken on Yaldabaoth and lived to tell the tale. He had one purpose, and that was killing demons: bogeymen of the night, devourers of souls, monsters that deserved worse than death.

_And others that didn't._

He couldn't squeeze out an answer, but the silence alone spoke volumes.

Rose put an arm around him and tugged him against her side.

For a minute, Dave allowed himself to pretend that he wasn't touching an eldritch proto-goddess from outside the universe that could vaporize him with the twitch of a finger, that it was just his regular-crazy sister sitting next to him.

He should hate her, but he didn't.

"They're not all like that, you know," Rose said quietly, letting go and setting her hand back on her own lap. "Dirks. I can see a nigh infinity of them in endless permutations through paradox space, some clearer than others, but many of them are decent. Caring, even. Not raging jackasses consumed by their own overblown egos and debilitating personality flaws."

"What _are_ you?" Dave mumbled.

"I'm Rose Lalonde," she replied. "I'm every Rose Lalonde. Once, in another reality, I played a game to create a universe. I won. I lived. I ascended, and now I'm this."

"You mentioned something," he remembered. "Your 'Ultimate Self'. Is that what that is?"

Rose sipped her coffee.

"Imagine every possible you in every possible reality, past, present and future. A Dave that becomes a film director. A Dave that dies young. A Dave that grows up to be a paleontologist. A Dave that slays demons for a living. A Dave that plunders ancient ruins for treasure. A Dave that becomes a time-travelling god knight and blows up a planet. Now imagine every possible choice each Dave makes, the sub-Daves branching off into thousands of different futures.

"Those are different Daves, but at the same time they're all _you_, simply partitioned into different boxes. The Ultimate Self is the overarching body of 'youness', the sum total of your infinite incarnations, potential and realized. Hence to access it is to strip away these metaphysical partitions, to unbundle the experiences and processes that constitute your many selves and draw them into one vessel."

Dave frowned.

"So you're Ultimate Rose," he said. "You remember being all these Roses, and that made you... come to this world and kill my bro?"

"I'm not sure it's possible to truly be Ultimate Rose," she admitted. "This vessel channels a staggeringly vast volume of Rose, but not all of it, and certainly not to perfect fidelity. Besides, the part of me that played Sburb, created the Green Sun, beat up fish Hitler and married the love of my life still exerts an above-average level of influence over my composite being. I'd be a distinct mind from any other Roses that 'go Ultimate', so to speak. But pedantry aside, yes: given the fundamental gap between the way I experience existence and the way most Roses do, it wouldn't be unfair to characterize me as Ultimate Rose for the sake of brevity."

"Yeah, so why are you here, though?" Dave pushed on.

She sighed.

"Somewhere out there, roaming the multiverse, is Ultimate Dirk." Rose's eyes darkened, literally, violet irises dimming a shade. It was the closest Dave had seen her to anger in this entire exchange. "And he's fucking everything up."

She paused dramatically to let it sink in. Privately, Dave thought it was a touch too theatrically self-indulgent.

"Ultimate Dirk," he repeated. "From your universe?"

He might as well throw skepticism to the wind at this point. If Omnirose said she was from another dimension, then she was: nothing he could do but run with it. 

"One timeline of my old universe," she agreed. "We used to be friends, though perhaps even that might be a bit of a stretch; we never talked much outside of work. That was more of your thing. We used to be allies, let's say."

"What happened?"

"Dirk has always been controlling," Rose said. "It's one of his many faults. He was already off the rails when he abducted me in a spaceship and downloaded me into a robot, but at the time I was too caught up dealing with the progressive disintegration of my mind to notice. Yet even then he had an purpose, the same one that convinced me to turn a blind eye to his Machiavellian machinations even after my new ascendant consciousness stabilized. Under his lead, we orchestrated the cosmic restructuring of our entire narrative medium. We clawed our way tooth and nail back to canonicity. We primed paradox space for a garden of new worlds. We'd won, again and forever."

Dave felt like he was missing a mountain of context here, but he nodded along anyway. He knew how Rose worked: let her blather on long enough and she'd eventually get to the point.

"Our quest should have ended there, but of course, he couldn't leave it at that. I could write pages of Wikipedian psychoanalysis trying to break down the precise chain of twisted logic that drove Dirk to his conclusions, but I'll spare you the faux-intellectual pretensions. He decided the multiverse wasn't good enough for his liking. We were gods, and he saw it his right to remake existence in his image. I'll concede that he started tame, 'fixing' worlds with a Heart player's deft hand at social engineering, but as always, he quickly lost patience with... How did he put it? 'Herding imbeciles'."

Rose fell into silence, no doubt taking another unscheduled dip in the ocean of unvoiced thoughts sloshing around in her head. It was almost creepy how much like his own Rose she was, down to the way her brow creased and her nose scrunched up when she started thinking way too hard about nothing. The aura of intangible darkness surrounding her, not so much.

(Actually, on second thought, that was pretty much on point as well.)

"What did he do?" Dave asked, breaking Rose from her contemplative trance. She looked vaguely lost for a second before pulling her thoughts back together.

"He began culling," she said, her lips thinning. "Destroying worlds that failed to meet his standards of quality. Depending on the precise genres of the worlds in question, annihilating millions, billions, even trillions with each fell swoop."

The boy's mouth opened. No sound came out.

It closed.

"Well, now Houston being consumed in hellfire doesn't sound that bad anymore," he muttered. "But that still doesn't explain what you're doing getting all fratricidal up in _my_ bro's grill. He's not the one perpetuating mass genocide across time and space for fun and laughs. Why don't you go murder that guy?" He managed to clamp down on the whit of bitterness worming into his voice.

"Patricidal, technically, in my case," she corrected. "But as much as I'd like to do so, that would be a suicide mission. The passivity of my class seems to gear my narrative powers more for sieving meaning from the miasma of potential realities, while the active nature of his grants a more direct control over the fabric of the immediate medium. Or perhaps class is irrelevant at these echelons of power, and my metatextual abilities are just underdeveloped compared to his. There aren't exactly a lot of data points to compare. Either way, I'll lose miserably if it comes down to a direct confrontation."

"What, so you're taking it out on-" Dave stopped mid-sentence, pieces clicking togther. "You said he remembers all of his selves. If every Dirk is part of him, the good and the bad, then by killing off the worst ones, you're de-assholeifying Ultimate Dirk? Is that how it works?"

Rose nods appreciatively. "Inject mountains of frustratingly convoluted temporal logic into the equation, and that's the gist of it. Cause and effect is ill-defined when dealing with temporally transcendental entities in an already achronological medium, but the Ultimate Self is mutable. If I can direct the growth, it's only a matter of time."

"But, then..." Dave hesitates, running the concept over in his mind. "Aren't you basically lobotomizing him? You're cutting away a whole chunk of his personality. Metapersonality? Changing someone against their will doesn't sound particularly ethical, that's all I'm saying."

"I'm fixing him," she said. "Dirk wasn't always this unhinged. Part of the change was reaching his Ultimate Self and absorbing his pre-Scratch iteration, yes, but what we did in splintering and canonizing the Genesis Frog exponentiated the problem. You have to understand that this reality you live in, and all other realities populating this sector of paradox space, are mutations of the alpha timeline in the predecessor universe Dirk and I originally came from.

"Even in that root timeline, there were two Dirks instanced on the flip sides of a temporal reset: the Prince of Heart I knew, who despite his flaws made an effort to be good, and your elder brother, a man that went to sleep every night cuddling what was possibly the most evil puppet to ever exist. The former might carry greater intrinsic narrative relevance as an Sburb player and immortal god, but the latter is entangled with the veritable black hole of canonical weight that's _your_ story."

"You keep using those words," Dave interrupted. "Narrative. Canonical. Is that a metaphor, or... you're saying some things are, what? Less real than other things? Like this world here is basically shitty fanfiction of your original canon universe?"

"That's an unnecessarily nihilistic way of phrasing it," Rose frowned.

"But not wrong."

"It's less true than it used to be," she said. "Under this post-canon paradigm, your experiences and contexts are just as metaphysically coherent as my homeworld's. All universes are equally true, merely more or less relevant and essential, and even those concepts has lost much of its meaning, relegated to relative descriptions rather than the objective measures they were prior."

This entire situation was turning increasingly bizarre by the second, and that wasn't even counting his dead bro rotting in a puddle of blood the next room over. But he didn't have time for pointless diversions into metatextual ontology, so why couldn't he just swallow his lingering confusion and move on?

"Ah, fuck," Rose muttered. Dave's head snapped up at the sudden curse. "Sorry. I didn't mean to do that. I'm starting to percolate into the text."

"What?" he said.

"Don't mind me. Anyway, the four of us, you, me, John, Jade-"

"_Jade?_" Dave said incredulously. He hadn't heard from her in _years_. "What's she... wait." The frostwolf pack. Jack Noir. Well, fuck—that explained a lot. "I'm a goddamn moron, holy shit."

"Yes," Rose said irritably. "The four of us—being the arguable primary protagonists of the Homeric epic, if only by a slim margin—are disproportionately represented in the field of derivative worlds spawned from our primordial template. Consequently, your bro gained a majority over the better Dirk, and that reflects in his Ultimate Self. He's _infected_ Ultimate Dirk. I'm just excising the necrosis."

"Huh," Dave considered. "I... guess?"

Internally, though, his crazy detector was starting to swing just a few degrees back towards "batshit" again. The sense that he _really shouldn't be having a tea party with this woman_ was back full force from when he first smelled the bloody funk drifting out from behind the door, before recognition had kicked in and lowered his guard.

The way she was casually talking about stamping out living beings like rats in an infestation, it sounded just a little too much like Megido for his taste. Unnervingly matter-of-fact, as if carving a bloody path across the multiverse was little more than a housekeeping chore. By the look of how much of a fight his bro had put up before being skewered, that wasn't far off from how much challenge it posed to her either.

"Nobody I killed didn't have it coming," Rose said, narrowing her eyes, as if reading his mind. "Your Dirk was the scum of the earth. Even your Rose figured that out."

Dave's instinctive reflex was to protest, to defend his bro—he had problems, yes, but she had no idea what they'd been through, what horrors they went up against on a daily basis, what that did to a person—but for some reason all the fight had drained out of him, as if with his brother's death so had his carefully cultivated labyrinth of of denial and wishful rationalization withered, and only now, confronted with the specter of a greater mortality of worlds upon worlds, were those layers of ablative shielding shedding away for good.

"I apologize for expediting the process," she sighed again. "I don't have the time to strip that contradictory mess down the old-fashioned way. The longer I linger, the more pliable the narrative becomes to even my subconscious whims."

"What the fuck are you going on about?" Dave repeated, confused.

"You'll figure it out some day," Rose said. "Or maybe you won't."

Though the woman hadn't moved an inch, the boy could sense the conversation drawing to a close.

"Wait!" he called out. He wasn't ready yet: he had more questions, he didn't want her to leave so soon. What had they even been talking about in the first place? "What's going to happen to me? What happens to this Earth? The Galveston hellmouth is undefended now!"

For all his crimes, Dave's bro had been pivotal in keeping the Dersian forces at bay for years. With him gone, the next incursion might be Texas' last.

"Someone will rise to the occasion," Rose said.

Dave chortled bitterly. "I hope you don't mean me. I'm not a hero. Even if I were that kind of guy, I'd be flattened by the first Giclops that shows up."

"You have an unfairly low esteem of your own character, Dave," she sighed. "Just as you have an unhealthy tendency to idolize those that don't deserve it. But no, I'm not talking about you. Your bro's not the only hunter in the world, you know. The Guild will sort things out."

The teenager knew, intellectually, that she was right. The First Guardians founded the Guild for a reason. Still, he couldn't throw off the sick feeling of wrongness in his gut. He didn't like the idea that the city could just _go on_ with his bro dead. He hated the notion of some dickwad with a pump shotgun coming in next week and traipsing all over the territory they'd held down for years with sweat and blood. He loathed how it grated against the narrative that their work had been essential, the compromise of being the lesser evil that had been doctrine for all of his life.

"You put that in my head," Dave accused, finally twigging to the thread of purple whispering between his thoughts. "That's not even true, holy fuck."

Rose grimaced. "I swear I didn't mean to that time. That's what I was talking about: my thoughts get away from me; it's a natural consequence of overstaying my welcome in one narrative stratum. Look, your abject failure of a legal guardian didn't even register you. You could put down the sword and move on with your life. Or don't—go find your Rose, or reconnect with Jade and John, sign up legitimately if you want to. You have a whole future ahead of you."

"I haven't seen Rose in forever and you know that," Dave snarled, snapping to his feet, but gears were turning in his head. "Jade clearly doesn't want anything to do with me, and John's better off without the toxic mess I'd be bringing into his life. You killed all I have."

"We both know you don't really think that," Rose informed him calmly, crossing her legs. "You're picking at excuses to be mad at me for killing your brother because you don't like what it says about your that you aren't. Let me assure you that anything less than gleeful celebration is overly charitable to the man already."

The boy swore, flash-stepping to the wall and snatching up one of his bro's katanas in a white grip. His head was beginning to clear, be it from Rose's messing or the natural abatement of his initial shock, and with that clarity began to crystallize the decision of what he had to do next.

"I hope you don't intend to attack me with that," commented Rose quietly.

"Of course not," Dave scoffed. He wasn't suicidal, and his sister universes-removed had him pegged as always: he couldn't bring himself to care quite enough about his bro's murder to attempt some last-ditch vengeance rush. No, he was done throwing his life away.

Instead, he turned and looked Rose dead in the eye.

"Take me with you."

Rose blinked.

"No," she said without thinking.

"So you can."

"I won't."

"Why?"

She looked genuinely flabbergasted. "What about your friends? You'd vanish without a trace, leaving them to wonder forever where you went?"

"I told you I haven't talked to any of them in forever. They'd think I got eaten by a ogre or some shit. They'll move on."

Her face screwed into an "I can't believe what you're saying" expression.

"You could have left once you finished the job," Dave changed tacks. "Why did you stay? Why are you still talking to me?"

"This isn't a recruiting mission," Rose stated firmly.

"Don't think I haven't noticed that you didn't mention a single person in your story other than you and Dirk. You can't stay in one universe too long, right? How long has it been since you had a proper conversation? You're starving for human interaction, admit it."

"I wanted to give you _closure_."

"Bullshit," Dave said. "You know what's closure? Not being consigned to an obsolete existence in a dead-end universe. Not being homeless and destitute in the heartless cradle of modern capitalist society. You want hobo Dave Strider selling his body to sleazy Catholic priests for Jesus biscuits and shitty wine to drink his childhood trauma away, that's how you get it."

Rose flinched.

"I don't know what it'll do to you," she said. "If you go Ultimate I won't be able to catch you like Dirk did for me."

"I'll take the risk," insisted Dave. Desperation was creeping into his words now.

"Why?" Rose exclaimed. Now she was on her feet as well, wands out and flickering with dark energy. Dave raised his sword, not letting the slightest hint of fear show. He was- He was adamant. "Is what's out there worth abandoning everything you know? Worth the total dissolution of your individuality?"

"_Yes!_" he shouted.

She didn't understand. "What are you looking for?"

"I want to see them again!" he yelled, voice cracking midway. "Terezi and Karkat, Kanaya, even that stupid clown. Rose, I loved them more than I ever loved you or Egbert or Harley or my bro. I don't give a flying fuck about anything else. I just need to see them again. Please."

Rose looked like she'd been slapped in the face with a wet fish.

"They won't be the same."

"I know," Dave said. "But they'll be _them_. Permutations of the same base template, right? That's enough for me. That's all I'm asking for. Come on, I'm begging you. I, Dave fucking Strider, am fucking begging you."

A second passed in strung silence as he stared at Rose, pleading in his face.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

"_Please_," he repeated, falling to his knees. He let the sword drop to the ground.

This had to work. Dave really, really hoped that he hadn't just humiliated himself for nothing.

"You're such a manipulative asshat," she muttered, but he could hear her reluctance bending. "Are you sure?"

He gritted his teeth. "I have never been more sure about anything in my life."

The longest minute of Dave's life ticked past. Rose's eyes were closed, wands bobbing faintly with every even breath. He had no way of telling what was going on in her byzantine super-mind.

Fine, she finally acquiesced.

Her eyelids snapped open, and behind were vortices of pure #b536da. Everything wiped away. For a brief second, she was all there was, the Seer of Light speaking reality into words, words into reality. Nothing existed except that contained in the text of her narration, no time, no place, no scene, only Rose and Dave rendered into being within a descriptive void.

Then they were  gone, and the apartment was empty again, bathed in the fading glow of of the setting sun. A katana laid forgotten on the ground, bearing silent witness, its vigil marked only by the distant caw of a roosting crow.

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea what drove me to write this. It's literally a oneshot that's 60% exposition on the setting of the oneshot. Also the ending is kind of oddly paced, but whatever.


End file.
